Installed Fedora, now system will not boot

[longrawker]

Hey.

I managed to successfully install Fedora on one of my HDDs, with windows on another. Once it came time to restart my system, it restarted, booted all the way to where it would normally start booting the OS, and stopped. Now I have a blinking underscore, and a blank screen.

My system is in my sig, XP and Fedora were on two different HDDs. I have unplugged the drive that had Fedora on it, and jumpered the Windows drive to master. Same problem.

Any help is more than appreciated.

[tireman]

Did you install a boot loader/manager?

[longrawker]

Originally Posted by tireman Did you install a boot loader/manager?

During the process, it said it was installing a boot loader. I cannot recall the name.

[mikeL]

In Fedora I think grub is the default, unless you specified lilo, you did tell linux to overwrite your MBR (hda). Aslong as GRUB is your bootloader.

You can try this,

boot into rescue mode, from your linux bootdisk.
then:
chroot /mnt/sysimage

to install grub on your MBR

grub-install /dev/hda

If this won't work you can always reinstall Fedora, seeing how it's on a seperate drive.

Mike

[longrawker]

Originally Posted by mikeL In Fedora I think grub is the default, unless you specified lilo.

Yeah, grub sounds right.

Now, randomly (at least that's how it seems) it boots to a boot select. It gives me three choices.

1. Fedora (random numbers? smp),
2. Fedora-up (random numbers?),
3. Other.

(in the order that I tried them)
The first option sticks after about 10 lines, on "disabling IRQ #169".
The third option, "other" does nothing. The screen goes blank.
The second option seems to work for 12 or so lines, then loops on "disabling IRQ #5 two lines of numbers and [< >]s" about fifty million times, then moves on to just "disabling IRQ #5" and loops seemingly infinately. At some point, the screen goes blank for about 30 seconds, then I get a scrambled image (grey white and black horizontal lines). This stage lasts about 2 minutes. After that, I get a black screen, with a black (outlined in white) x that appears to be my cursor (lags quite a lot). One minute later, the cursor changes to an hour glass which rotates veeery slowly.

Now, after all of that, it appears to be finally starting up. I get a progress bar, and an image of a computer. It's moving equally slowly.

So about 30 minutes, and it's still like one eighth of the way through that progress bar.

Someone told me Fedora was one of the faster distributions?



Thanks for the replies, by the way.

[longrawker]

Ok, I solved the slowness problem. (Bad overclock settings...)

That still leaves the problem of me now not being able to boot windows.

Does anyone know how I could fix this? Near as I can tell, it just needs to be added to the boot loader.

Thanks for the help.